


Doctor Who and the Terrible Heron

by x_los



Category: Doctor Who, Doctor Who (1963)
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-03-30
Updated: 2010-03-30
Packaged: 2017-11-17 12:12:55
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,474
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/551442
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/x_los/pseuds/x_los
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The Doctor's sandwich-thieving reaps its terrible karmic reward.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Doctor Who and the Terrible Heron

Title: Doctor Who and the Terrible Heron  
Author: [](http://x-los.livejournal.com/profile)[**x_los**](http://x-los.livejournal.com/)    
Rating: G  
Pairing: Three, Jo  
Summary: The Doctor's sandwich-thieving reaps its terrible karmic reward.  
Beta: [](http://aralias.livejournal.com/profile)[**aralias**](http://aralias.livejournal.com/)   
A/N: THANK YOU to the people who had shit to say about the earlier draft. I did what I could, and, well, now it's sent, so I do not want to know what's still unclear and wrong b/c I'll just *headdesk* some more. :p Again, /thank you/.

Doctor Who and the Terrible Heron

 

 

As the Doctor toppled off a Brighton pier, he concluded that the heron was even more sinister than it had initially appeared. He staggered to his feet, spat out sand, and brushed at his now filthy velvet jacket, glaring up at his mangy foe. This was, by far, the cruellest indignity he had endured in exile.Well, no, perhaps that honour went to UNIT’s standard of canteen tea—but this was, beyond a doubt, the second worst indignity.Actually, if pressed, he supposed the incredible popularity of sideburns in this decade was more of an affront to his soul and sensibilities, if taken all together. Still, having his lovely sandwich stolen by a blasted heron was certainly among the greatest indignities of his imprisonment here.

 

Jo Grant stepped into the path of his glare, and the Doctor’s expression softened slightly.

“Come on, Doctor,” she tried. “There are more in the hamper. I made dozens!” Jo was too used to the Doctor stealing her food at any convenient opportunity not to have prepared for the inevitable.

The Brigadier had sent them investigate rumours of a ghost ship. As ‘paranormal’ tended to actually mean ‘extraterrestrial’ more often than not, UNIT had become the final destination for most of the English armed forces’ odd bits of odd business. Jo had heard the Brigadier’s crisply-pronounced ‘Brighton,’ figured it for a day’s job even with Bessie’s super-speed, and started getting a hamper together. She’d nodded obligingly when he’d tried to impress upon her that this was serious business, and had, with due gravity, continued to pack various breads and spreads.

The Doctor had almost immediately tracked down the blowfish-looking alien (responsible for the apparitions. The Doctor had given young *click*F’narr a stern talking to, threatening to holophone its broodmothers if it didn’t stop messing about. Though *click*F’narr’s appearance had shocked Jo, the Doctor explained, with a snort of derision, that he was hardly worth getting worked up about—just a galactic rich-kid on his gap year Grand Tour, pulling a practical joke.

It was possible that the Doctor resented the freedom that implied almost as much as the recklessness it demonstrated. Jo had persuaded him to take Bessie out to the pier so they could be rewarded for their troubles with a proper picnic lunch on the beach. England wasn’t as bad as all that. Jo felt there were certainly worse times and places to be marooned than her home, and that the Doctor remembered as much when he was in a good mood. As she predicted, food had coaxed the Doctor out of his brown study. Jo couldn’t have known that disaster hovered about their heads, ready to swoop down on wings of…well, very dirty feathers.

The triumphant heron alighted on the pier next to her, extending and retracting its long neck several times in rapid succession as if mocking the Doctor’s all-too-literal downfall and daring him to make something of it. It clutched a large baguette in its great yellow-pink beak. The Doctor’s eye twitched. That beast had made him look like a damned fool, hopping up and down in a mad attempt to rescue his coronation chicken and loosing his balance in the process. He’d be shaking sand out of his unruly hair and ruffled shirt for the better part of the day.

“That,” the Doctor insisted to his assistant, pointing at the fiend, “is no ordinary heron, Jo. I’m certain it’s being controlled by forces beyond our immediate understanding!”

“What, like animal telepathy? Hey, I’ve read about that! Do you think it’s really true?” Jo was excited, as always, by the prospect of something wildly improbable meriting the Doctor’s firm ‘yes Jo, it’s all true.’ Between what she’d seen herself and the sort of stuff the Doctor blithely confirmed, Jo was willing to believe all sorts of things.

“What? Oh honestly Jo, use your sense; of course it’s not ‘animal telepathy,’ of all the confounded nonsense.  You know sometimes I think you’d benefit from getting to know Miss Shaw. Now there was a rigorously scientific mind…” The Doctor sighed, fixing a far-away, wet look on a passing cloud. “She didn’t want to leave UNIT, you know. She was bullied into it by her Department.”

Jo ignored this with good grace. The Doctor occasionally went a bit Mr. Wodehouse. This was hardly the first time she’d heard about ‘poor Liz’ being dragged back to Cambridge by the hair, and she had it on Benton’s good authority that, fond of the Doctor though she’d been, Liz Shaw had gone back to her research with a smile on her face.

“But what could be manipulating a heron?” the Doctor mused.

“Oh, I don’t know. Does the Master do birds?”

“Certainly not,” the Doctor scoffed. “Even he wouldn’t stoop to something so blatantly silly.” At least the Doctor hoped not, for his enemy’s dignity’s’ sake. That whole affair with the plastic flowers had been more than enough, not to mention his stint as a village vicar. “Besides, I suspect he’s left the planet by now, and even a powerful telepath would find it difficult to extend his reach across space and time. No, something else is behind this.”

“Hunger?” Jo suggested, glancing over at the bird. “I think I’ll call him Frank.”

“Why are you _naming_ the thief?”

“He picked it himself!” Oh here he goes— _Fraaaaaaank_!” girl and bird proclaimed in unison.  Jo’s small head was perched on one pier, and the bird still sat on the next. They both looked down at the Doctor, their heads cocked at eerily similar angles.

“That’s very disconcerting, Jo,” he scolded, then frowned as a strange rigid expression took hold of her face.

“Must—consume—” Jo’s voice was low and hard, and her breath grew shallow. “Must—must feed—”

“Jo?” the Doctor’s eyes widened. “Jo, are you alright? Has that creature infected you? Come away! Oh, I knew it was under some sort of—”

“Must—consume—another delicious sandwich!” Jo raised the basket with parodying robotic slowness, removing a cucumber-on-white-bread-with-the-crusts-cut-off and shoving it into her mouth.

“Oh very funny,” the Doctor said sourly as Jo burst into giggles, covering her mouth with her hand to keep her beach fare from becoming see-food.

“I egret nothing,” Jo said solemnly, and then grinned harder still. “Get it? _Regret_ , and a heron’s a sort of egret—”

“I wasn’t groaning because I didn’t understand the pun.” 

With a final glare at the heron, the Doctor resigned himself to ignominious defeat. As if appreciating his submission, the heron took its leave, glidingsmugly out over the sea.

The loss of the sandwich was perfectly in keeping with the deprivations that coloured the rest of his exile: he couldn’t visit acquaintances scattered across the galaxy and the time stream, no one could lend him the end of the Harry Potter series (he’d been on the second to last book in his previous body, and now it hadn’t even been written yet), and now this. Doctor: 0 for sandwiches and dignity alike, Heron: 2 (1 delicious coronation chicken sandwich and another 1 for a suave exit). It really wasn’t fair.

The alarming descent of a foil-wrapped squaresnapped the Doctor out of his strop. He stuck up a hand just in time to keep it from braining him.

“Well done. Venusian sandwich-catching?” Jo teased as he unwrapped the package and took a sullen bite.

“Hah,” the Doctor said after swallowing. “I’ll have you know I’m a member, in good standing, of the Drones Club, where the ability to toss and catch rolls and similar bread-products is quite highly-regarded.”

Jo rolled her eyes. “Even I know that’s not a real club.”

“It isn’t now, true, but in a few centuries a place of that name will be the most elite gentlemen’s establishment in all the skyways of Victoriana Regina.”

“Honestly. I can never tell when you’re joking about this kind of stuff.”

“I most certainly am not! Throw down another sandwich and I’ll tell you all about it,” the Doctor said, polishing off the one he was holding and waggling what he thought of as a very persuasive eyebrow.

Jo smiled and selected one marked ‘cheese and pickle,’ glad the Doctor had come back from that remote place he sometimes went, and gladder still that she’d made enough of these to sate even his black-hole of an appetite.


End file.
